My talk today is on the relationship between analytical philosophy, critical thinking, and spirituality.  I hope to show that while analytical philosophers pride themselves on their ability to think critically, they usually fail to do this about spirituality, and indeed, analytical philosophers have their own unquestioned assumptions that stop them from thinking critically about spirituality.

At the beginning, I should make it clear what I mean by spirituality.  Being spiritual is different from being religious even though people sometimes confuse the two.  Being religious is being part of an organized tradition, with rituals, dogmas, and a religious community.  While religions are concerned with spiritual matters, spiritual phenomena are different from religious ones.  Spiritual phenomena are those we encounter in a way beyond our five senses and are not explicable by our present conception of the material world.  Divine inspiration, mystical experiences of oneness or closeness with the sacred, dreams that gives us messages and subtle intuitions are all spiritual phenomena and spirituality is concerned with these things.  Only some aspects of religion are concerned with these matters.

In order to understand analytical philosophy’s relationship to spirituality, it helps to understand a little of how analytical philosophy developed.  Contemporary analytical philosophy is commonly thought to have been begun as a reaction to the NeoHegelianism that was prominent at the end of the nineteenth century.  G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell became disgusted by the NeoHegelians with their fuzzy thinking about the Absolute and their spiritual sense that the individual was much less important than the whole and derived her meaning from being part of the whole.

At its beginning, contemporary analytical philosophy was infused with a desire to get beyond this fuzzy-headed mushiness by being grounded and concrete.  This desire leads to the best features of analytical philosophy: it has a clearheadedness, an emphasis on critical thinking, being logical, and defining one’s terms while making sure one has a grasp on what one is talking about.  These qualities are some of the most important reasons analytical philosophy has continued to appeal to philosophers for the last one hundred years.  Few Anglo-American philosophers have any desire to go back to the fuzzy-headed spirituality of the NeoHegelians.

Because the early analytical philosophers were reacting to the NeoHegelians, these early philosophers saw any talk about spirituality as fuzzy, uncritical mush.  Since then later analytical thinkers have their suspicion that spirituality and critical thinking can not go together reinforced by continental philosophers.  While much of continental philosophy is atheistic, the most important of them, the German thinker Martin Heidegger, was very interested in spirituality.   Heidegger, with the rest of Continental philosophy, owed much to the Hegelian tradition and so continental philosophy is infused with what seems to be fuzzy thinking.  The best known example of this kind of thinking is Heidegger’s statement that “the nothing noths.”  While he may be continuing a line of thought from Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, it is hard to figure out exactly what Heidegger means here.

When analytical philosophers look outside of the university and encounter the contemporary world, they find plenty of reinforcement for their assessment of spirituality as something that is infused with sloppy and wishful thinking.  For example the fundamentalist Christians argue that creationism as well as evolution are both scientifically acceptable hypotheses to explain our existence.  These creationists say the world is only ten thousand years old and the fossils which seem to be older can be explained rather easily by saying the devil put them there to test our faith (thus making scientists devil spawn), or (more generously to scientists), God put the fossils there himself a few thousand years ago.  If creationism was not bad enough, the influential Christian preacher Pat Robertson had the goodness of heart to warn Orlando, Florida that God would send hurricanes to attack that gay-loving home of Disneyworld unless they changed their tolerant ways towards homosexuality.   Or who could forget Oral Roberts’ ingenious fund-raising methods: Roberts claimed that a 900-foot Jesus told him that he would have to raise a couple million dollars from his followers within a short time or Roberts would be called home to heaven.

With some Christians continually making statements like this, all analytical philosophers have to do is read the news and they can wonder if those interested in spirituality have an iota of critical thinking ability in them.  I do not want to pick on the Christians as the Islamic, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalists do more than their share to help analytical philosophers get the idea that an interest in spirituality is inextricably linked with being a sloppy thinker.

Even worse than these groups, though, in helping analytical philosophers get the idea that spiritual concerns corrode one’s ability to think are the New Agers.  The New Age movement has been growing for the last thirty years and it emphasizes alternative spirituality and new paradigm thinking.  Some of its main concerns are reincarnation, crystals, channeling, meditation, herbal remedies, aroma therapy, subtle energies, and wellness.   New Agers come from a different socio-economic group than the fundamentalists: they are better educated, more prosperous and are often at the forefront of modern popular culture.  Unlike the fundamentalists who think the epitome of culture is velvet Elvises, the New Agers enrich our culture.  They give us things we enjoy and find valuable.  Just to use music as an example, if you like rock, Madonna is a Kabbalist and both she and Alanis Morissette have explored Indian spirituality.  If you like country music, the Judds are big into Deepak Chopra and holistic healing.  If you like Latin music, Ricky Martin wandered like an ascetic in India and learnt yoga from the followers of Yogananda.  Finally, if you like Santana, he claims all his inspiration came from the angel Metatron.  Moreover, some of our best and brightest students here at UWSP are often interested in New Age concerns like meditation, holistic health or yoga.   Because these New Agers are not tied to any religious tradition, book or dogma, if it is possible to be a critical thinker and be spiritual at the same time, the New Agers would seem to be much more likely to do it than the fundamentalists.

Unfortunately though this movement is at least as full of uncritical thinking as the fundamentalists.  If anything, the New Agers appear to be worse as they make many statements which disgust analytical philosophers and reinforce their view that critical thinking and spirituality can not possibly co-exist.  The worst of this sloppy thinking is the narcissistic view that one creates reality.  Here’s how the actress Shirley MacLaine talks about how she created the world:  “Reality isn’t separate from us.  We are creating our reality every moment of the day. . . . since I realized I created my own reality in every way, I must therefore admit that, in essence, I was the only person alive in my universe. . . .  [I have] total responsibility and power for all events that occur in the world because the world is happening only in my reality.  And human beings feeling pain, terror, depression, panic, and so forth, were really only aspects of the pain, terror, depression, panic, and so on, in me!  ….I knew I had created the reality of the evening news at night.  It was my reality.  But whether anyone else was experiencing the news separately from me was unclear, because they existed in my reality too.  And if they reacted to world events, then I was creating them to react so I would have someone to interact with, thereby enabling myself to know me better.”  I for one am glad I am only a bit player in Ms. MacLaine’s reality.

Not all New Agers are like Ms. MacLaine and think they create all of reality.  However, some New Agers do talk of how each person is responsible for creating or choosing everything that happens to them.  These New Agers are not like the Stoics who said you are responsible for your reactions to events and thus create reality-as-you-experience-it.  Instead these New Agers say you create the very things that happen to you, not just your reactions to these things.  These New Agers then say the Jews chose to have the Holocaust happen to them.  A couple New Agers even say that the Jews did this because they wanted something to complain about.

Another example of sloppy  thinking is when New Agers talk of reincarnation, it seems that thousands of them have claimed to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra and other such glamorous figures in world history.  When questioned whether their beliefs are true, New Agers will often respond that if it feels true, it is true.  Analytical philosophers hear these kinds of statements and they want to scream: you need to think more critically, not be more in touch with your feelings.

Now if all this were not enough to convince us that spirituality is so infused with wishful thinking and emotionality that one can’t both be spiritual and a critical thinker, we could look at the case of someone who could be considered a fore-runner of the New Agers- the English writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Doyle is best known for the Sherlock Holmes books.  In practical terms, Holmes epitomizes the virtues analytical philosophers stress: critical thinking, never getting lost in emotions or wishful thinking, groundedness, an empirical attitude and an emphasis on elementary logic.  But Doyle did not just write the Sherlock Holmes series, he spent most of his later life lecturing on how we can commune with the spirits of the dead.  But to those concerned with critical thinking, he is also known for his claim to have proof that nature spirits, particularly fairies, exist.  His evidence for this claim was, shall we say, lacking.  In front of you, [see last page] you have the photo that Doyle claims proves the existence of fairies.  Look at the picture closely and you will see that these fairies have wings just like fairies are supposed to have, and they are the right size to be fairies.  Furthermore they are happy and gay like fairies are supposed to be.   Never before has more compelling evidence been offered for the existence of fairies and any five-year old would now agree with Doyle that fairies exist.

Considering how much evidence analytical philosophers are continually given by spiritual people that they lack any ability to think critically about their claims, analytical philosophers might be excused for believing that spirituality and critical thinking are totally incompatible.  But the glory of philosophy is examining the seemingly obvious and questioning whether what seems to be common sense is really true.  So we as philosophers should wonder whether just because spirituality and critical thinking so often do not go together, does that mean they are necessarily mutually exclusive?  I contend that there is no necessary connection between spirituality and irrationality and hope to convince you of that in the rest of my talk.

I have never seen an angel or a ghost, a demon, or a nature spirit, but many people I respect have.  A few weeks before I got married my fiance and my future brother-in-law went for a walk up a mountain one full-moon night in New Hampshire.   A few hours later they came running back to their parents’ house.  After catching their breath from running four miles back from the mountain, they told me they had been attacked by a demonic spirit.  They didn’t see the demon but it knocked my future brother-in-law to the ground and banged his head against a rock and filled him with a deep sense of evil and horror.  As I looked at them and wondered about their claim, it was obvious that something had happened to them as they were clearly agitated.   Furthermore there was absolutely no evidence of any New Age wishful thinking or soft mushy feelings as they did not benefit at all from telling me and their parents about this attack.  My fiance even gave me a reason why a demon would attack them: for the last few nights my brother-in-law had been taunting ghosts saying that they were stuck on earth because they were fucked up and they did not have the balls to show themselves to him or to anyone else.

I wondered if they had seen this demon.  It was clear they thought they had seen a demon and I had every reason to think they were reliable, credible witnesses who did not benefit from this story.  In fact they lost social status in their family of Wall Street lawyer-types by telling us this story.   And my brother-in-law, who used to spend enormous amounts of time in the woods, no longer ever went into the woods after this incident.    I was uncertain about the whole thing and I shrugged my shoulders and told myself: who knows, maybe it was demon that attacked them, taking the Shakespearean attitude that there might be more things in the world than dreamt of in my philosophy.

Taking that position seemed to me to be the attitude most congruent with the philosophical spirit of not being tied to any belief system.  But when I discussed angels and nature spirits with our former colleague Andrew Cohen, he dismissed out of hand the possibility that angels, ghosts, or nature spirits could exist and he was incredulous that I was taking the possibility of their existence seriously.  The interesting thing, though, was that Andrew did not give any arguments against the possibility of angels or ghosts existing.  Andrew seemed to be assuming that no right-thinking person would take the existence of these things seriously because only people who had emotional reasons to want these things to exist believed in them.  Andrew seemed incredulous that I was arguing that it was possible that angels or ghosts existed.  What was most interesting to me though was that when I challenged Andrew’s assumption that only emotionally wishful people believed in angels, he did not feel the need to argue against this position because it seemed to him that all right-minded people thought it was obvious that angels could not exist.

I found Andrew’s lack of argument for his point very interesting.  Analytical philosophers base their self-image on their ability to give arguments for their positions.  They feel the need to give arguments for their positions in order for their views to be taken seriously.  Andrew, on the other hand, felt absolutely no need to give any arguments against angels or ghosts.  Instead he seemed to be sending out the energy that all right-minded people agreed with his position, so what was I doing bringing this question up?

Thinking about Andrews’ response later on, I realized I had heard this kind of thinking before: in church.  When I talked to Andrew about ghosts or angels, I got the same reception one would get from a priest or a church elder if one impolitely questioned an essential church dogma: both sent out that right-thinking people agree on these issues and if one is dense enough to continue to question them, one will lose one’s status as a member of that community.

Thinking of the similarity between Andrew’s lack of arguments against ghosts, and other church groups, I thought that with Andrew’s dismissal of angels and ghosts, that I was not in the realm of philosophy, but in the realm of faith.  Andrew did not feel the need to give me any arguments against ghosts or angels because he seemed to have faith that these things did not exist.  He seemed to be assuming that because it was not possible to experience non-material angels or ghosts, they could not possibly exist.

I may be wrong about Andrew believing that if we could not sense ghosts, then they did not exist, and it is not important for my concerns what he personally believes about this issue.  I am much more interested in the underlying faith of analytical philosophers and some analytical philosophers do edge towards the position that if we cannot experience something, then it does not exist.  When Berkeley attacks Locke’s belief in the reality of the external objects, part of Berkeley’s assumptions seem to be that if we cannot experience something, then it does not exist.  This attitude could also be underlying the logical positivists’ pejorative labeling of god statements and ethical statements as nonsense because we can not experience anything about them.  Furthermore, when I was in graduate school I heard some of my former professors and fellow graduate students make similar claims.  While teaching here, students who consider themselves analytical philosophers also have made similar statements.

Analytical philosophers can legitimately argue from their own premises that if we cannot experience something, then we cannot talk meaningfully about it.  But Berkeley, the logical positivists, and other analytical philosophers seem to take the incautious next step: if we cannot experience something, then it does not exist.  I do not see any way that analytical philosophers could prove this point is true.  It is notoriously hard to prove a negative statement and so how could we prove something could not exist?  The statement that things like ghosts or angels do not exist if we all do not experience them is a faith statement, very similar to the statement that Jesus Christ is our Lord and savior and, praise Jesus, Halleluia Lord, He can heal us of our troubles right now if we open our hearts to Him.  In fact, those making this claim about Jesus may be more intellectually honest than these analytical philosophers as Christians are aware their basic premises are faith statements, while these analytical philosophers do not seem to realize that.

As I thought about this faith statement, it seems to rest on a deeper belief in empiricism: the belief that we only get knowledge through our senses.  Such empiricism does seem to be accepted by all analytical philosophers.  The interesting thing about empiricism is that if we look at it closely, it is not just one statement, but actually two.  The first statement is that people get their knowledge from their senses.  The second statement is that we only have five senses.  These are two very different statements and it has not always been the case that these two statements have been assumed to be the same.

While John Locke revivified empiricism at the beginning of the Enlightenment, many of his most prominent and influential followers did not think we received knowledge from only our five senses.  Francis Hutcheson, who was one of the most important Utilitarians as well the teacher of David Hume, believed in empiricism, but he thought we had a moral sense.  Hutcheson said that with this moral sense we all sensed right and wrong.  Another intellectual influenced by Locke’s empiricism was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.  Wesley studied Locke rather extensively at Oxford and agreed with Locke that we got knowledge through our senses, but Wesley said that we had more than five senses; he thought we had a spiritual sense by which we received spiritual insight and which allowed us to sense spiritual truths.  Because of this emphasis on a spiritual sense, churches influenced by Wesley, like the later Holiness movement and the Pentacostalists, sanctioned direct divine inspiration and this has contributed to making American culture more lively.

Empiricism that limits humans to only the five senses (which I will call sensory empiricism) has no room for spiritual phenomena, but an empiricism that allows knowledge from other senses beyond the normal five is very amenable to spirituality.   A philosophy that is based on an expanded empiricism (which I will call spiritual empiricism) can keep all the good features of empiricism—its groundedness and dislike of fanciful flights of thought, its clearness and simplicity, and most importantly its tendency to think critically–  without subscribing to the very limiting view of reality of sensory empiricism.

Before I talk about spiritual empiricism though I want to say a little more about Hutcheson’s moral sense as the history of that idea is a warning about how not to expand empiricism to include other senses.  Hutcheson’s idea that we had a moral sense was one of the most popular ideas of the Enlightenment.  The problem of proving we had this moral sense, though, is that not everyone’s moral sense works in the same way as do the other senses.  So when we look at this lego dinosaur I am holding up we all basically see the same thing with the same colors and same shape.  But if we have a moral sense it unfortunately does not make people arrive at the same moral judgments.  Throughout history many different people have argued totally different practices were moral.  Even today we have practices like female genital mutilation being defended as morally acceptable.  So it seems that all humans do not have this moral sense which functions just like another sense.

Hutcheson’s case shows the difficulty of expanding empiricism by saying that there are other senses that we all have just like our sense of sight and touch.  For that reason I am hesitant to argue that there are spiritual senses that all people have.  Instead I am going to argue for the much more modest claim that some people are able to get knowledge from senses beyond the traditional five.  I am going to go a way similar to Wesley’s and argue that some people have spiritual senses through which they can get knowledge.

By spiritual sense I mean a more subtle way of getting knowledge such as through dreams, divine messages, gut feelings, or angelic inspiration.  This way of knowing is a way of picking up information that is beyond the five senses and so I am calling this way of knowing spiritual empiricism.  It is empiricism as it is based on getting knowledge from experience, instead of claiming like the rationalists that we can get knowledge from ideas innate in our mind.  It is empiricism because people claiming to get a divine message from God or inspiration from an angel are having an experience.  These experiences are beyond the five senses, but they are experiences nonetheless.  So this spiritual empiricism is not in the realm of faith or religious belief because it is based on people’s real experiences and their receiving important knowledge from them.   Maybe the word spiritual is not the best word to describe this kind of empiricism because to some people spiritual implies knowledge only of God and angels.  Maybe the word non-sensory empiricism would be better, but I am particularly interested in spiritual knowledge so I will continue to use the word spiritual empiricism to describe my philosophy.

When philosophers talk of people who have experienced spiritual knowledge, the most obvious person to talk about is Socrates.   Socrates is often considered the patron saint of philosophy and analytical thinkers admire his critical thinking abilities.  But the interesting thing about Socrates is that he was not a believer in sensory empiricism.  Socrates received messages or knowledge about the world from his dreams as well as from his daimonion, best translated as guardian angel.  In the Apology, the Crito and other dialogues, Plato makes it clear that Socrates based significant parts of his philosophy on these messages and he also allowed them to guide him in life and death decisions.

Socrates inspired a long tradition of rational spirituality in the west.  This is a tradition which emphasizes critical thinking along with spirituality and some of the most influential philosophers of the classical world like Plato, Plotinus, and the Stoics were part of this tradition.

I consider myself part of this Socratic tradition and have been inspired by it since I was fifteen.  Because of my reading of Socrates and Plato I have long been interested in spiritual matters.  From my exploration of this Western tradition of rational spirituality, I have discovered that it has only been in the last two hundred years that spirituality and critical thinking have been seen as mutually exclusive phenomena.  Before that time, the best philosophers, scientists, and thinkers were almost entirely spiritual people.   From Socrates to Newton, Franklin, and Paine, there has been a long tradition in the West of rational spirituality.  It is only a recent cultural phenomena that intellectuals have turned against spirituality and linked it with sloppy thinking.

To illustrate how this spiritual empiricism plays out in people’s daily lives, I want to tell you a story about a message from a dream that I once received.  I had gone to college in Hanover, New Hampshire.  After I left college I went to California and I thought I was going to stay there.  One morning in Santa Barbara, I woke up remembering a dream with a very clear message: go back to Hanover and do it fast.  This message immediately felt like it came from some deep part of me that was connected to something deeper than my ego and its desires.

Knowing about intuition from Socrates, Plato, Gandhi and other people, I followed this intuition, even though it meant I had to spend the last of my money on a plane flight and there seemed no reason to go back to the East Coast.  The night I arrived back in Hanover I met a woman – Alice Keefe—a woman whom I had previously known only slightly, and we hit it off.  It turned out that she was about to leave on a week-long canoe trip with someone who was romantically interested in her.  Because I hurried back and she became more interested in me, she ditched this guy and a few months later we were engaged.

This dream obviously changed my life.  I want to argue against the analytical philosophers that it brought me knowledge of the world that I could not have gained through my five senses and the analytical philosophers are making a mistake when they insist our knowledge is confined to our five senses.  Obviously I am not the only person who gets knowledge from dreams.  Many other people do, especially people in non-Western cultures.

Given this common situation about dreams giving knowledge as well as “women’s intuition” giving knowledge or Socrates getting divine messages, I do not understand how analytical philosophers can be so adamant in their faith in sensory empiricism.  I had the experience of my dream and it indeed provided me with some of the most important knowledge of my life.  Many other people have the same kind of experiences.  It seems to me that sensory empiricists are uncritical thinkers who are accepting a faith that has little basis in human experience. Sensory empiricists are probably afraid of non-sensory knowledge because everyone they encounter who talks about spiritual knowledge seems to be a sloppy thinker guided by their emotions.  Analytical philosophers do not see that this linkage is only a recent cultural phenomena.  Once we get beyond the present cultural situation, then we can see that sloppy thinking and spirituality do not necessarily go together: one can be a critical thinker and be spiritual at the same time as many of our culture’s greatest minds show.

There are some critical questions we can ask about getting knowledge from dreams.  Once we allow that dreams can be a possible way of getting knowledge, how do we tell which dreams are giving us accurate knowledge about the world?  In other words, how do we separate knowledge-giving dreams from other ones?  How come only some people seem to get true knowledge-giving dreams?   We can also ask what is reality like if dreams can give us knowledge of the world?

Unfortunately the classical philosophers are of little help with these questions.  Socrates received messages from his daimonion and his dreams but he never questioned them or wondered about them.   As far as we can tell, he unquestioningly followed them and did not think critically about them at all.   The little we have of the classical tradition inspired by Socrates is not much help either.

In the Enlightenment, however, the French philosophe Dennis Diderot discussed Socrates’ messages, and Diderot hypothesized that there must be some kind of subtle energy connecting all things and Socrates got his messages by sensing this subtle energy.  This subtle energy is very similar to what Mencius and other Chinese philosophers call the qi and while I am reluctant to hypothesize this subtle energy as we don’t directly experience it, if it existed, it is an explanation of why some people are capable of getting knowledge from their dreams.

At this point, the answers I could give to the other questions about dream knowledge are not very important.  The significant thing is that we can apply the methods of analytical philosophy to dreams and other ways of getting knowledge beyond our five senses.   We can embrace analytical philosophy’s emphasis on clarity, critical thinking and non-flakiness without accepting analytical philosophy’s faith that it is only through our five senses that we can gain knowledge.

As I wrap up this talk, I want to differentiate my philosophy from that of a similarly sounding one: William James’ radical empiricism.  James calls for an expanded empiricism, saying of his empiricism that “to be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced … a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced. “  The last statement that empiricism should not exclude any thing that is experienced I certainly agree with.  James, however, has a far different agenda than do I, and in the final analysis, he does not stick with his empiricism and instead he gets mushy about faith.

First, James clarifies his expanded empiricism to say that “radical empiricism does full justice to conjunctive relations.”  That is to say, his philosophy countered the traditional empiricists’ emphasis on the part and which saw the whole merely as a collection of parts.  So the aim of James’ philosophy was far different from mine as his primary goal was doing justice to a sense of unity in our experience.

More importantly, in dealing with spiritual matters, James abandoned his empiricism and in my opinion went wooly-headed and lapsed into an uncritical mindset.  In his essay “The Will to Believe” and a companion set of notes entitled “Faith and the Right to Believe,” he argues for “our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters.”  He says that “Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birthrights of our mind.”   He claims that many of our beliefs are decided by our passions and wishes and this is acceptable because “faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.”  He says that we should not follow those skeptics who queerly command that we should “put a stopper on our heart and instincts.”  At the end of the essay he says that in life “we have to take a leap in the dark” and he sanctions a leap towards faith.

What James is arguing for is far different from what I am defending.  He is saying that there is a right to believe or a will that we can indulge by believing.  Spiritual empiricism is not in the realm of belief or the realm of following our desires; spiritual empiricism does not say that it is okay that we believe something because we wish it was true.  Spiritual empiricism is firmly grounded in the realm of experience, experiences that are outside the realm of the five senses, but experiences nonetheless.  Socrates did not have some will to believe that he was getting divine messages, he was experiencing himself getting divine messages.  I did not have some will to believe in dreams, I experienced a dream that had an important message in it for me.  I have never experienced demons and ghosts, but other people have told me they have.  My work is not like James’ attempt to make space for the will to believe, that is not any kind of empiricism, expanded or not.  My work is making space for experiences beyond the five senses and that project is entirely unconnected with the realm of faith.

James’ project actually hurts mine because in arguing for the right to believe or the will to believe, he is reinforcing the view of many analytical philosophers that people who talk of non-sensory phenomena always abandon critical thinking and go wooly-headed.  So when an analytical philosopher reads James they can say to themselves: here those spiritual people go again, getting all soft and mushy around spiritual things.

Unlike James’ radical empiricism, spiritual empiricism does not fall into mushiness and does not defend any right to faith or belief.  It stands firmly grounded on experiences and confines us to experiences which give us knowledge of the world. Thus it shows a way that one can be both spiritual and a critical thinker at the same time.

In conclusion, spiritual empiricism not only can embrace critical thinking, but it can legitimately claim to be even more critical than analytical philosophy as it has the good points of analytical philosophy while not falling into its dubious faith in sensory empiricism.